Editor's Introduction

by Harvey Breit

WHAT is happening in India today is difficult even for the Indian writer to understand. There are many complications. One of the most serious is the absence of communication among Indian writers themselves. The writer creating in his native language of Urdu or Marathi has little idea of what his brother working in Tamil or Bengali is up to. There are many languages in which the ends of serious literature are being pursued and as each language is basically foreign to the other, each literature remains unrevealed to the other. Here and there, through unbelievable acts of determination or graceful acts of friendship, a translation into English is published and thus read by the others.

Another obstacle is poverty. There are few magazines and fewer media for serious literature. There are few readers who can afford the purchase. There are even fewer writers who can afford to write. Payments are low; more often than not they are zero. Shall we then even begin to mention the translators who can afford to translate? These arr physical obstacles. There are still others. The emergence of India as a dignified, autonomous state is both too large a theme and too confounding to the recent traditions to help the writer at this juncture. He is sometimes overwhelmed. While in many instances the writer is oriented toward the West, especially if he has had a British education, he may also be one who feels a magnetic pull toward Moscow or Mao. He is often an Indian democrat who, like some of his political leaders, identifies the West with imperialism and therefore views it with distrust.

Who can blame him? Vet the reception I had, an absolute stranger, among the Indian writers once they learned of my mission, was extraordinary in its warmth and candor. This is no contradiction. As one Marathi writer said, “We have seen the politicians and the businessmen. We have had enough of that. Send us your writers. Send us Hemingway.”

Indian readers are just beginning to know our best writers, but they seem drawn to them. How many of them talked to me about Wall Whitman! They admire our short story, our Melville and Thoreau, our literary criticism. If only we can show them that we have a human and honest side, and that our living tradition is based not on an idea of domination but on the need to have free people freely working together, they will be our good friends. There is every reason why Melville and Whitman and Hemingway and Faulkner must work for us in building this friendship.

It was my mission, as emissary for Intercultural Publications, to collect modern Indian writing. I am deeply indebted to Frank Moraes, the Editor of India’s leading newspaper, The Times of India, for first giving space to the project in his pages. Other newspapers subsequently picked up the story and manuscripts from every corner of India began to arrive — a flood of them that kept me reading into the small hours of the night. The anxiety I had that no manuscripts would come in at all proved unfounded, and the problem became one of selection.

One eminent author, however, presented a rather special problem. When I asked Pandit Nehru if he would honor us by writing something for this collection, he replied, “Do you want me to go to jail ? ”

“Of course not!” I said. “But what do you mean?”

“The only time I have to write,” he said, “is when I am in jail.”

The sum of my experience was revelatory. I had never realized there were so many Indian writers and so many that were so dedicated. There were no slicks for them to shoot at, no jackpots, no material rewards. The writers who were writing, it struck me, needed to write. That was something not to be minimized. Not all of them were equally gifted, of course; too many, under the spell of England, wrote like Maugham; too many, under the earlier Russian spell, wrote like Chekhov. But there were others, the “happy few,” who wrote like themselves, who wrote stories that reminded me of nothing but a good story. I hope, and believe, that there is much in this sampling which American readers will find rewarding, bringing them closer to the life of India than they have been before.

My contacts with India’s artists were almost as fruitful. The financial problems of the painter or sculptor in India are just as acute as those of the writer — rich patrons are few, and museum purchase funds limited — but everywhere I met a devotion to the creative principle.

In India, in a country such as India where illiteracy is a basic problem, the intellectual plays a weighty role in his country’s life. Far more than we can imagine, he helps create the climate of opinion. We ought not to neglect him. It remains for us to exchange our ideas with those of the Indian reader, and to show him that we are not indifferent to the creative process wherever we find it.